Bit Weaver

Bitweaver is an advanced, object-oriented, open source web application framework and content management system written in PHP. bitweaver is targeted at high traffic, high reliability websites. It uses the ADOdb database abstraction library and Smarty Templates template presentation framework. Originally known as TikiPro and derived from TikiWiki, bitweaver distinguished itself through over ten thousand code changes which lead to a high speed, modular, fully customizable web application. Bitweaver prides itself for supporting Postgres, MySQL, and Firebird databases on Linux, Macintosh, and Windows. Due to its modularity, scalability, data integrity, and stability it is ideally suited for enterprise or large scale, high traffic websites. Its ease of use makes it also ideal for small sites. Learn more at http://www.bitweaver.org.

Database The bitweaver team have made it a top priority to keep database access numbers to a complete minimum as these can usually be seen as the bottlneck in this type of application. They have reduced the database access number from a whopping 250 to a mere 40 or so for an average page load - and they believe is still room for improvement!

bitweaver takes advantage of the http://adodb.sourceforge.net database abstraction library and Smarty Templates. ADOdb allows it to connect to a number of different databases including the incredibly advanced PostgreSQL (preferred by many of the lead devs), as well as the ever popular MySQL and Firebird. Oracle is working but has limited testing.

Code bitweaver has experienced an immense amount of code refactorization and new development. The most notable feature however, is the fact that bitweaver is now completely modular! This means that you can simply install a new package (formerly called feature) and customize the functionality of your bitweaver install. It is equally possible to uninstall, or even delete an entire folder from your server without any consequences (save the required folders of course).

Features The bitweaver team is highly focused on making the core features as powerful and fast as possible while removing the obscure and buggy ones. These core features include wiki, blogs, articles, phpBB forums, FishEye? image galleries with quota system and privacy control, bitCommerce commerce engine, GalaxiaWorkflow?, and more. See http://www.bitweaver.org/wiki/bitweaverFeatures for more details.

Templates A Smarty system - The powerful http://smarty.php.net template system allows bitweaver to strictly separate logic from content. The Smarty templates are basically HTML code, which makes them easy to learn and modify. This makes it easy for users to customize the visual aspects of your system without having to learn the guts of the system.

CSS and Tableless The sophisticated bitweaver css class selectors make styling easy, flexible and incredibly powerful. This makes the users job easier because there is less to code. As a result, the css files in general are about 10 - 15 kb compared to the the overwhelming 50 - 65 kb in TikiWiki or other cms systems. For more information see http://www.bitweaver.org/wiki/CssSchema.

The html has also been refactored and removed a ton of useless css classes and replaced the with the appropriate HTML tags. e.g.: <td class="tableheading"> is now <th>. On that topic, the bitweaver designers made it one of their aims to avoid tables where possible, thus they use tables only where browser compatibility issues make it absolutely necessary or appropriate, such as data listings. However, even some of these have been replaced with unordered lists to gain styling freedom using CSS.

XHTML 1.0 Strict Compliancy Additionally, virtually all pages are checked on w3c for XHTML 1.0 Strict compliancy and changes aren't committed before all errors and warnings have been dealt with. This is a lot of work, but the bitweaver templates are very easy to read and work with. Despite the indenting and easy to read templates, the output is smaller since bitweaver strips all our templates of excess white space during Smarty compile time, making download times shorter.